adventures

Saturday May 5th

Today we decided to go for an adventure and took the car and headed southwest, over through Mcclean and to parts unknown, and all in all we probably drove 150 miles

I forgot to mention when I told about the fair that was over in Mcclean that it is a very Scottish town (what was your first clue?). As we came into town today I noticed all the telephone poles were painted in Scottish plaids with the name of the plaid and I guess the clan it belongs to. Pretty amazing that someone would go to all that trouble as we probably passed 30 poles that were painted. I have included 2 here for you to see. At the fair there was a band that included 6 bag pipes and 3 kids on drums, everyone was dressed in full regalia. In a town of about 4000 that is a lot of bagpipes.

Another thing I found interesting at the fair that I did not mention was the “sugar cane room”. It was a large three-sided structure that was filled with the best the county had to offer in sugar cane. Kind of like who had the largest cabbage at the Palmer fair up in Alaska when we lived there, or who had the best wheat at the Bozeman fair. There were probably 50 different examples of sugar cane in the building. Greg had to haul me out of there; he didn’t think it was very interesting. You find sugar cane juicing machines around town, the local coffee shop has one and it is really quite good with a bit of lime juiced with it, supposablly it has a lot of minerals in it.

The Clarence River is a huge river that dominates this whole area. Everywhere you drive you see signs about flood levels and all the houses are build up off the ground (probably for more than the reason of flooding). Freddie’s house is on Macalo Island in the Clarence River, and about 2000 there were huge flood warnings, but it never got higher than the bottom step of the house. They had to take all the livestock into town, and put all their furniture up off the floor. This seems so strange to me that people would build in what is obviously a flood plain.

The country around here is very fertile because of the river, and as I have mentioned much of it is sugar cane fields. Where we went today there were a lot of cattle, both dairy cows and meat cows. At times you could almost believe you were in the rolling hills of California, with the cattle and huge groves of eucalyptus or as the aussie call them, gum trees. There are by far way more gum trees down here, nowhere do you see the hillsides covered with them in the states like you do down here. We drove on small back roads, (that is all there is, the main motorway is only 2 lanes), some of them paved and some of them just dirt. We passed one or two cars in an hour’s time, and in some stretches did not see any homes at all. We did see one area where there were some big beautiful homes and you could picture the area being the next Santa Inez valley. It was very beautiful and idyllic.

Words for the day...”overtaking lanes ahead” are passing lanes on the motorway, a chook is a chicken, a mate is a friend and a bloke is a man. km

Sunday May 5, 2007

One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the clubs and the big role they play in the Australian social life. Here in yamba we have the surf club, the golf club and by far and away the biggest club in town, the lawn bowling club. Yes folks, the lawn bowling club. When you go by there in the late afternoon, there can be 20+ games going on. Everyone is dressed in white or blue and white. I have not stopped long enough to see how old the players are, but my guess is that they are older folks (older than greg or I). The parking lot of the place is packed every time we have gone by there and I suspect that folks go down there to have dinner and play a game of lawn bowling. All of the clubs have restaurants and bars that are the main component of the club and a lot of them serve breakky (breakfast), lunch and dinner. Greg and I have wanted to go down and check it out, but this weekend they were having some kind of a competition going on we were told by a bloke that works there one day when we were surfing. When we do go we will give you the inside scoop on the place. km

Monday May 6

Yesterday as I was walking the neighborhood, I came across a papaya tree that had some blossoms on it and since I had never smelled a papaya flower before, I picked it. I could see there were a number of blossoms where only one fruit could develop so I didn’t feel badly about picking the small cream-colored flower. Wow, was I in for a treat, the flowers smell just like the fruit tastes!! How yummy is that?!

I have a memory from Namotu I would like to record before it is lost in the dusty recesses of my mind. We were out at Left’s in the early morning light one of the last mornings we were there, and as I was paddling to make it over the top of the fairly good sized wave, I saw a large school of smallish neon blue fish in the face of the wave just before it started to break. It is magic moments like this that are the real reason people surf. Catching the waves is only a bonus as far as I am concerned. You can see the pink light of that early morning in some of the pics simon took of me that morning.

While I am at it I remember snorkeling one day and seeing this school of tiny (no bigger than ½”) blue fish hovering over a big head of coral. It was amazing how they were so tuned into the movement of the other fish. If I got to close to them they would sink into the folds of the coral head, and if I let myself drift away a bit they would form a cloud about a foot away from the safety of the coral. It was a very lyrical sight.

We have not been able to piggyback onto the wireless connection we had last week, I am hopping that is because they have been closed. It is really nice to have that connection here at home, rather than having to go somewhere to hook in. why don’t they put a wireless connection in computers like they do phones? You can hook into the intenet through your phone. I guess in my ignorance that is what I expected form a laptop….just use it where ever you want to.
km